The Fantastic Four

In 1967, Hanna-Barbera produced the first Fantastic Four animated series, introducing Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Marvel superheroes to a generation of Saturday-morning television viewers. The theme song alone — brassy, bombastic, and completely earnest — became one of the most recognizable in cartoon history.

The Fantastic Four were Marvel’s first superhero team, created in 1961, and they were different from anything that had come before. They didn’t have secret identities. They argued with each other. They lived in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby invented something new: a superhero team with the personality dynamics of a real family, which made their powers feel like extensions of who they actually were rather than costumes they put on.

The 1967 series ran for 20 episodes. It was followed by a second animated series in 1978 and several more iterations since. The characters have never gone out of circulation — which is fitting for a team whose name implies that they are, in some way, genuinely fantastic.

At TNT we use the Fantastic Four as our primary metaphor for the four technologies that power every single web page on earth. The match is not arbitrary — each hero’s defining power maps precisely onto what their technology actually does.

The metaphor works because these four technologies are not interchangeable — each does something the others cannot. HTML provides meaning and structure; CSS controls appearance; JavaScript controls behavior; Bootstrap 5 provides the professional framework that makes everything responsive. Like the Fantastic Four themselves, they only reach their full potential when they work together.

Every web page you have ever visited was built from these same four technologies. Whether it’s a multi-billion-dollar e-commerce site or a student’s first project, the stack is identical. Learning them is not optional if you want to build things for the web — it is the job.

Meet the Full Team — Interactive Character Page

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four in 1961 as a direct response to DC’s Justice League. Publisher Martin Goodman wanted a team book. Stan Lee wanted to quit the industry entirely. His wife Joan told him to write the kind of story he actually wanted to write, since they could fire him anyway. The result was the most influential superhero team in Marvel history.

What made them different was their dysfunction. The Thing resented his transformation into a rock monster. The Human Torch was a cocky teenager. Sue Storm was systematically underused for the first several years. Mr. Fantastic was so obsessed with science that he was often emotionally absent. They were extraordinary people with ordinary human problems — and that combination created a template that defined superhero storytelling for the next sixty years.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s collaboration produced some of the most important creative work in 20th century popular culture: the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and the Avengers all came from their partnership between 1961 and 1965. It is one of the most productive creative collaborations in American entertainment history.

The second clip below (2022) covers this history directly: the transition from comic pages to animated series, the creative decisions behind the characters, and why a team first published in 1961 is still being adapted into film and television more than six decades later. If you’ve never really understood why comic books matter as a medium, this is a good starting point.